Hi! I’m curious about your extra year of high school gap year in Italy! How did you get involved with that? Is there an organization that arranges these experiences? And how did you fit into high school there, given that, as far as I know, students there specialize toward a career earlier than in the US? Did you already speak Italian? You’re describing my dream that I thought was impossible!
Yes!!! I am more than happy to talk about this and help high school students find potential resources, because it is very much possible!! [Important note before I start: I am speaking entirely from a USA perspective. I know there are exchange programs in other countries, but I don't know about them.]
I got lucky; I knew about the potential for a gap year exchange student program since forever because my mom had done the same thing back in the 80's - take a gap year between high school and college, and attend an extra year of high school abroad.
While there are a number of programs out there that do gap years for exchange students, I ended up going through Youth For Understanding (YFU). I looked into a few different programs but in the end YFU was the best fit for me, and I honestly would really recommend them. They've been around since 1951 so they have a lot of experience, and they were actually the exact same program that my mom went through. I will say, it does cost some money, but the costs are also WAY less than a single year at a state university. I know some people in my same program had scholarships, so that is definitely a possibility.
The way it works is you apply for a program, then before you're fully accepted YFU sends out a representative to interview you. The interview is to see if you would be a good fit for the program, and if you seem like you would be able to handle living with strangers in a different country. Then YFU partners with an exchange program in your target country and creates a profile about you. They send your profile to families looking for an exchange student, so that the family can decide if they think you'll be a good fit. You get to choose which country you want to go to, but you rarely get to choose where you get to go within that country; it all depends on where your host family lives.
They also take care of enrolling you in school; if you have host siblings, you will usually go to the same high school that they do. You have a YFU connection in the states, but more importantly you also have an adult representative of YFU (who is NOT your host family) from the target country to help you take care of problems that might arise. Any issues with school, visas, travel, host family problems, etc., the representative will help you deal with.
Now, I didn't mean to choose Italy. I actually had planned on going to a French speaking country. My mom had done her gap year in French Switzerland, and I had taken 3 years of high school French. However, I have never ever in my entire life been good at planning long term and I waited too long - by the time I applied for the program, every single spot in every single Francophone country was full. But I figured, hey, Italy is pretty, and it has lots of history, and it's a still a romance language, right?
So yeah, going in I didn't actually speak any Italian, though I think my knowledge of French grammar helped a little bit. But honestly, there is quite simply no better way to learn a language than to be immersed in it. If you've studied languages at all I'm sure you've heard that before, but it's true. Studying a language in high school is light-years away from real immersion, but that's expected. YFU actually organized Italian language lessons for everyone in the Italy program because they assumed that no one had any experience with Italian.
As far as fitting in goes, it's kind of like any other high school. Yeah, some places do choose a vague career path by high school, but that doesn't mean you won't fit in. In fact, one of my problems was that everyone in my class was super studious and didn't have a lot of time to hang out - it had nothing to do with a lack of friendliness. Usually you start out as the oddity that everyone wants to know and ask questions of, and as time goes on there are usually at least one or two students who become true friends, legitimately interested in you as a person and not just as "the foreign exchange student". Of course, just like any other time in your life, there's no way to predict or plan who you will meet or get along with. That's part of the journey of it all.
I cannot recommend doing a gap year exchange program highly enough. Having already graduated high school meant that I didn't have to worry about my grades at all, and I could focus on the experience of living in another country with another family. It was also my first experience really being on my own, and because I was older (18-19) I felt more comfortable and confident than if I had gone when I was younger. Because it is definitely not always easy or smooth sailing, even for the most prepared or well-adjusted of students.
If you or any other student has any other questions about what it's like to participate in a high school exchange program, please message me!! That gap year was, to this day, one of the best things I've ever done and I would love to help more people get to have that experience.
